“The Execution”Gabrielle Faust

It was an execution.

And the world bore witness

As the gunmen clapped and counted bullet holes

As if an innocent man were nothing more

Than a hunting trophy and not an American citizen.

There is a brutal white noise,

Bristling, bristling in the bitter cold reckoning

Of another vicious bloodthirsty execution,

On a sidewalk heavy with fresh snow,

Imprinted by their jackboots,

And his handprints,

Where he had knelt,

For the last time and now never more.

I sit here on this couch,

The makeshift place where I lay my head

In my time of abstract homelessness,

Listening to the shrapnel sleet descend,

A mockery of snow which now has become

A symbol of hard times and harsher realities,

Not the soft flurries of Hollywood fantasies,

Sharp and violent as a skull against concrete,

Each crystal a cry of indignation and fury,

Perhaps a personification of

The heart of this nation as it breaks,

Shattering into mirrored shards that

Reflect the blinding sun off the snow,

Illuminating the lies ingested in the

Recklessly gluttonous denial

That hastened our journey

Into this dystopian hellscape.

My own heart beats frantically against

Their razor wire fascism,

Until it feels as if it might shred and be blown away,

Ignited by the sun only to rain like skeletal ash

Down upon a nation on fire in the snow

That now runs crimson with tyranny.

It was a murder.

And the world bore witness,

As the “Greatest Country in the World”

Became just another dictator’s

3^rd World Nation.

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